2016م - 1444هـ
Dialnet-LinguisticsInAppliedLinguistics-720765





ABSTRACT. This paper looks at some of the underlying reasons which

might explain the uncertainty surrounding applied linguistics as an

academic enquiry. The opening section traces the emergence of the field

through its professional associations and publications and identifies

second and foreign language (L2) teaching as its primary activity. The

succeeding section examines the extent to which L2 pedagogy, as a branch

of applied linguistics, is conceived within a theoretical linguistic

framework and how this might have changed during a historical period

that gave rise to Chomskyan linguistics and the notion of communicative

competence. The concluding remarks offer explanations to account for the

persistence of linguistic parameters to define applied linguistics.







1. INTRODUCTION



Perhaps the most difficult challenge facing the discipline of applied

linguistics at the start of the new millennium is to define the ground on which

it plies its trade. The field is not infrequently criticised and derided by the

parent science, linguistics, which claims authority over academic terrain that

applied linguists consider their own. It should be said, however, that applied

linguists themselves seem to attract such adversity because of the lack of

consensus within their own ranks about what it is they are actually engaged

in. The elusiveness of a definition that might string together an academic

domain of suich wide-ranging diversity, which appears to be in a perennial

state of expansion, makes definitions unsafe, not to say time-bound, and in this

sense Widdowson's (2000a: 3) likening of the field to "the Holy Roman

Empire: a kind of convenient nominal fiction" is uncomfortably close to the